The Creation Myth of Modern Political Philosophy

Response by Nancy Pearcey, senior fellow of the Discovery
Institute

Presented at the Sixth Annual Kuyper
lecture
Sponsored by the Center for Public Justice, 2000

I agree with Dr. Skillen's taxonomy in his Kuyper lecture last night, when
he said there are essentially two positions or traditions on politics that are
widely held among Christians today. What I'd like to do is probe them more deeply
and ask why they are inadequate--and why a better alternative is needed.

The first tradition Dr. Skillen described follows Augustine in saying the state
was instituted because of the Fall; its purpose is primarily negative-to restrain
evil and punish lawbreakers. The second tradition sees individuals as endowed
with God-given rights, and the state as a mechanism for protecting those rights.
Here the state is artificial, instrumental, a means to other ends rather than
having its own ends or goods. In either case, as Dr. Skillen put it so well,
there can be no positive art of statecraft since "there is no state to craft."

To understand better why these views are inadequate, I'd like to start by setting
a historical backdrop and contrasting them to older views. In the classical
world it was assumed that everything in the cosmos possesses its own inherent
goods or ends or purposes. Among the goods possessed by human beings are certain
ones that can only be expressed in their common life, the polis. In fact, these
are the highest goods, such as justice: By participating in the polis, the individual
is drawn beyond the limits of himself and participates in a higher good, the
common good.

In the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas "Christianized" this philosophy. The state
was not instituted after the Fall as a remedial measure, he said; instead, it
is an expression of our social nature. The state would have arisen even if there
had been no Fall into sin, in order to direct the community toward the common
good. Political life is the context where human beings practice the civic and
moral virtues required to fulfill their purpose, their telos, which is ultimately
to become a citizen of the Heavenly City.

Now, when we come to the early modern period, there is a dramatic break. The
classical and medieval view was rejected as elitist and theocratic. The reason
for that is important: If the state has some higher ideal, then we can come
to know it either by reasoning or by revelation. Either way, it is altogether
possible for some of us to be mistaken--for you or me to be wrong about our
higher purpose. It was natural to conclude that those who rule should be those
who understand these higher ideals more fully--who have greater wisdom and virtue.
In its classical version, this meant the philosopher-king. In its Christian
version, it meant the primacy of the Church over the state.

As a result, much of modern political philosophy can only be understood as
an attempt to avoid precisely this conclusion--as an attempt to place politics
on purely secular, naturalistic foundations, one known by direct, immediate
experience accessible to each individual.

Let's look at some examples. The first modern political thinker was Machiavelli
(1471-1528). He taught that the foundation for the state is the individual's
instinct for self-preservation: The effective ruler is one who succeeds in identifying
this instinct with the instinct for the preservation of the city-state. How
does he do that? By violence and fear. He kills off his rivals and hangs them
in the public square and so on.

What this means is that the source of the political order is not a higher good
but an outright evil--deception, cruelty, violence. What motivates citizens
is not moral duty but fear and self-interest. As French political philosopher
Pierre Manent says, "the political order is now a closed circle having its own
foundation within itself, or rather below itself." Machiavelli has asserted
"the self-sufficiency of the earthly, secular order."

We see the same thing in Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In his system, the source
of the political order is the fear of death. Hobbes assumed that the way to
identify the essence of human nature was to hypothesize what we would be like
if we were stripped of all laws, tradition, customs--of civilization itself.
This pre-political, pre-social condition Hobbes called the "state of nature."

What do we find in this natural state? The war of all against all. The threat
of death hangs over everything, and life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short." In this state of war, each person has a "right" to whatever he needs
to preserve his life. Now, he may decide it would be more pleasant to give up
some rights, such as the "right" to steal from one another, and this transferring
of rights is called a contract. It becomes the basis of moral obligations.

Thus moral duties are not revealed truths; they are created when individuals,
from selfish reasons alone, decide it is in their interests to contract away
some of their rights. This is also the source of the state: To escape the constant
fear of violent death, individuals agree to renounce the right to defend themselves,
and to transfer that right to an absolute sovereign.

This is a form of pre-Darwinian naturalism, where the foundation of the state
is not justice or some other higher good, but merely the individual's desire
for self-preservation. This foundation is incontestable and indisputable because
it is based on something beyond discursive reasoning and above any objection-on
the instinctive fear of death.

This is a very important point: Hobbes is building on the foundationalism of
Rene Descartes in his famous cogito--"I think, therefore I am"--where clear
and distinct ideas in the mind of the individual would constitute an indubitable
basis for true philosophy. For Hobbes, the fear of death harbored in the breast
of the individual would constitute an indubitable basis for politics--a basis
immune to the criticisms or claims of any older authorities, whether the polis
or the Church.

The philosopher who had the greatest impact on the American founding was John
Locke (1632-1704), and he too begins with the "state of nature." But for him
the threat of death comes not from other people but from hunger. The most basic
right is the right to eat. By exerting his labor to find or grow food, the individual
creates property. And to protect that property more effectively, he enters into
a social contract with others. The motivation for political life, then, is not
duty or love of justice, but enlightened self-interest.

Again, this is an example of Cartesian foundationalism. For Locke, all that
exists ultimately are individuals and their needs or wants. We do not choose
our wants; we simply have them. They are given. What's more, we cannot be wrong
or mistaken about the things we want, because they are not known by inferential
reasoning but by introspection into the immediate data of consciousness. We
know better than anyone else what we want, and no one else can tell us what
will make us happy. That means we don't need to look to people of special wisdom
or virtue to be rulers. The individual's desires form an indubitable and incontestable
foundation for political philosophy.

Finally, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) also begins with a "state of nature"--but
for him, the individual is stripped down to the point where he has no nature.
He is unformed, indeterminate, a beast--a gentle, peaceful beast (contrary to
Hobbes), but a beast nonetheless. Thus Rousseau's definition of human nature
is, paradoxically, not to have a nature but to be free-free to create oneself.
Freedom itself becomes the Cartesian foundation of Rousseau's system. To quote
again from Pierre Manent: "With Rousseau, freedom becomes . . . an inmost and
immediate feeling" of autonomy.

This is the point when revolution in the modern sense becomes possible--not
just revolt against a political regime but the attempt to destroy society and
rebuild an ideal one from scratch, one that will transform human nature itself
and create "the New Man." For if human nature can no longer be defined positively,
if it is indeterminate, this opens an unlimited space for the state to impose
its own definition of human nature.

What do these examples show? Let's draw together some common themes. First,
the motive for much of modern political philosophy was to locate an autonomous
foundation for the state, independent of the Church or Christian truth. Second,
the strategy was to locate a foundation for the political order not in any higher
ends or spiritual goods, but in the direct, unmediated experience of the individual.
The Cartesian subject asserts itself as the sole principle of political legitimacy;
the source of legitimacy is the consent of isolated, autonomous individuals.

You can see why this approach resulted in exactly the two themes Dr. Skillen
traced: an individualism that relegates the state to a derivative, artificial
construct, and a reduction of its role to negative functions--violence and force.
Social contract theory departed dramatically from classical and medieval views
of the positive art of statecraft.

I want to take the last few minutes to address Dr. Skillen's proposal for recovering
a positive understanding of statecraft. His starting point is to assert that
the state has its origin not in the Fall but in creation. I would like to expand
on his argument, using the schema of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. One of
the insights of the Reformed tradition--which I have developed more fully in
How Now Shall We Live?--is that Creation, Fall, and Redemption not only describe
the shape of the biblical narrative but also provide conceptual tools for analyzing
the elements of any worldview or philosophy.

Every philosophy or ideology offers a concept of Creation, a theory of ultimate
origins, an answer to the question, Where did we come from? Every philosophy
also offers a concept of the Fall, a theory about the source of evil and suffering
in the world. And every philosophy offers a form of Redemption, a vision of
how to reverse the Fall and set the world right again.

This breakdown clarifies the crucial role played by the "state of nature" for
social contract thinkers: It is their creation myth, their alternative to the
Garden of Eden. As philosopher Nancey Murphy comments, it "is a new myth of
origins at variance with the account in Genesis." These thinkers sensed that
in order to propose a new view of human nature, they needed to produce a new
account of human origins. Because they were working prior to Darwin, they were
ambiguous about whether they were offering a historical account or merely a
hypothetical construct; but in either case they realized the importance of grounding
their theory in a new creation myth. In this myth, the ultimate reality is individuals--all
relationships are derivative, created by individual choice, including the political
community.

Those of us who take our lead from Genesis hold a very different understanding
of human nature. We start with the assertion that humans were created in the
image of God--a God who is a Tri-unity, whose very nature consists in reciprocal
love and communication among the persons of the Trinity. Thus the image of God
is reflected NOT in the creation of an autonomous individual but in the creation
of a couple--male and female--who are related from the beginning in the social
institution of marriage, which in turn forms the basis of society. The point
here is that relationships are just as ultimate, just as real, as individuals.
They are part of the created order, and the moral requirements they make on
us are not impositions on our freedom but expressions of our true nature.

What does this mean for the state? The political community, too, is part of
the created order. It is not a creation of individual choice but an expression
of the divine image in humanity; it is not merely an expedient way for individuals
to protect their rights but the context for developing our full human nature,
achieving our telos; it is not founded on the immediate subjectivity of the
individual but on moral ideals such as justice and civic service. And finally,
it is motivated not by our lowest instincts of fear and self-preservation but
by our high sense of moral duty and service to God.

What is the relevance of these ideas to the issues we face today? Consider
just two recent books. Democracy's Discontent, by Michael Sandel, says
the background belief of liberalism today is the concept of the "unencumbered
self"--where all obligations and relations are products of choice. Along similar
lines, Rights Talk, by Mary Ann Glendon, says modern American law typically
depicts the "natural" human person as a solitary creature; our law, she notes,
is "based on an image of the rights-bearer as a self-determining, unencumbered
individual, a being connected to others only by choice."

It is clear from these two examples alone that the questions we have discussed
today lie at the heart of America's current cultural crisis.